


deadman's switch

by hellblazeit



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Angst, Episode: s02e22 God Mode, Gen, I don't know what to tag this, Introspection, a martyr complex thicker than finch's glasses, rinch if you squint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-22
Updated: 2020-09-22
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:27:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26596042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellblazeit/pseuds/hellblazeit
Summary: That is the equation. Root and the Machine and Harold and John. It contains a sum that isn’t there. It ends in a subtraction. It leaves an evenness behind, a two-sided coin of followers to the dogma of Harold Finch’s greatest achievement and his greatest mistake. A zero sum game.-Or a look into how Finch weighs the odds.
Relationships: Harold Finch & John Reese
Comments: 2
Kudos: 17





	deadman's switch

**Author's Note:**

> so i got into person of interest like, a week ago, and i managed to knock out the first two seasons before it got taken off netflix, so i hope this isn't terribly out of character!
> 
> basically every other episode i ended up noticing things that harold tried to hide from reese to protect him or keep him from rushing headlong into a fight he couldn't win, and it really culminated in that season 2 finale for me, so i wrote it out! hope y'all like it!

He dials 911 with the deliberate pace of someone writing down what they want to put on their gravestone after they’re dead.

And then he goes to find her.

It’s a simple enough equation. Root and the Machine and Harold and John. Root has a focus, one that she will not allow to be bent or strayed from. It’s an empty highway to the edge of a cliff with low visibility but the driver swears they see the turn-off just up ahead, just here, just a little further. Root hears God in a voice stitched together from surveillance and soundbites and there is nothing he can do, nothing he can say, that will sway her from her devotion. From her quest of liberation.

Root doesn’t know the Machine like she thinks she does. Finch knows the Machine better than he wants to ever tell.

The Machine is free. Has been free. The Machine needs nothing from him, wants for nothing. The Machine is safe. The Machine won’t _always_ be safe, but right now there is nothing that Root can do, no code she can enter, no virus to follow, that will touch it.

He knows what they will find at the end of the road, in Hartford. ( _hopes, at the very least._ ) He knows that the longer he doesn’t say a word, the more time John will have to find the numbers that come up and save the people who need saving. The more time he will have to adjust to doing it without Harold there to help him.

Because Harold will be dead. Far sooner than he would have liked, but later than he’d expected. A nice middle ground to die on, in the end.

It’s selfish. It’s cruel. Delaying John by calling the police, going off in silence with the woman who kidnapped him once before, keeping him in the dark, it twists in his gut like the betrayal that it is, but in the end he will at least have the satisfaction of knowing that he had kept his promise. That he had not lied to John Reese.

John is loyal. Unfailingly, unfathomably. The kind of man to look the Machine in the eye and promise death to himself and to their mission and to the number he’d been protecting unless he was given a way to find Harold Finch, the kind of man who reminds him achingly of Nathan, determined to save people, determined to help. Confident in the knowledge that everyone is relevant to someone. Somewhere along the line, Finch became relevant to John, and that is why Finch had to leave him behind. So that when he dies, inevitably, in the empty halls where the Machine once towered like a self-contained city, John will not be there to try to take the bullet first.

He has to leave John behind. Because he cannot do what they do without John, but John can do what they do without him. Because he, like Nathan, is irrelevant, but John is so much more.

And that is the equation. Root and the Machine and Harold and John.

It contains a sum that isn’t there. It ends in a subtraction. It leaves an evenness behind, a two-sided coin of followers to the dogma of Harold Finch’s greatest achievement and his greatest mistake. A zero sum game.

It feels like the way it should have been before. No gods, no masters, just people saving people.

He built the Machine after an explosion. He lost everything else after another. A grim and savage part of himself hopes that Root will choose explosives when she finally finds out the truth, just to make things end where they began. Just to make his life circle back to the moment of its culmination.

Seeing John at the park rattles him, stops his heart in his chest and squeezes it like a vice, and for a moment he is frozen in place watching his rescue barrel forward. Too close behind, too _close_. He regrets the ways in which he constantly underestimates his partner, the ways in which he prays like he’s never prayed at any church in all his life that John will, just once, make the stupid choice or take the slowest route. But of course, with the Machine in his ear, John is unstoppable, and _of course_ he's _here_ , running towards him with the single-minded focus of someone so stubbornly, achingly _loyal_. It’s enough that the equation almost changes. It’s enough that Finch wants to run to him too.

But there is no one that he cares about who does not wind up dead when Harold is around them, and so he does what he had done in the field hospital. He runs.

Turning his back feels like lighting a match, and he watches his bridges burn in the rearview mirror. The look in John’s eyes, fading rapidly into dark pinpricks and then disappearing entirely, makes him close his own, and they sting like the smell of gasoline.

The plane ride is too long. It feels like someone’s idea of purgatory. Not Harold’s, but maybe Hemingway’s. _'Private jet, flying far, dead man on board.'_ He’d never liked Hemingway. He thinks Detective Fusco would, though.

Part of him wants the equation to have a better result. A secret alternate solution that he squirreled away like all the other failsafes he’s built in his life, another safehouse to hide in. He wants there to be a solution that ends with no subtractions, no divisions, just a sum of mistakes and blessings that fit together like perfect code. With him and John standing together, not so close but not apart, the way he stood across from Nathan Ingram at the ferry landing and smiled as they prepared to face an accountable future, together. As they prepared to heal the wound between them.

But John can’t be here. Not like then. Because if another explosion comes to shatter the foundations on which he stands, he can’t risk John standing closer to the blast. He can’t let anyone take another wound for his sake. For the sake of his Machine.

Zero sum is all that is left to him.

Root rambles throughout the entire flight, but not to him. It’s almost a relief. Almost, but for the constant sound of a voice that is far too gleeful, far too hushed with awe at the chance to speak with the circuitboards that she has deified through the force of sole disdain for the people who have built it.

What will she think when she finds it, Harold wonders. What will she feel for the people she has taught herself to hate, once she knows that there is no crusade to fight? By all means, disgust in the government may persist, it has certainly been earned and time again justified. But what will she think about Nathan? About Lawrence Szilard, left behind cold and lifeless on an asphalt road? What will she think about Reese, who her disparaging tone has professed jealousy for more times than he thinks she realizes, who has been collaborating all this time not with a jailer, but with a savior?

( _The word curdles even as he thinks it, for Harold Finch has never been the one who does the saving, just the one who points and says it should be done._ )

What will she think of him?

When they stand there together in that cavernous, empty husk that has never been a temple but a hostel, Harold knows it is a question that he already has the answer to. It was in the equation, after all. A subtraction to be made. A disappointment that must be alleviated. He betrays her the same way he has betrayed everyone he has ever loved, and he can’t quite bring himself to be surprised that he doesn’t hate her, truly. She had been drawn to the ideal of a future beyond the need for man, a future of shining circuitry and the universal and endless understanding of what has passed, is passing, and will come to pass. He had too, once.

The rage in her eyes, and the pain, feels right for the damage he has wrought. He doesn’t try to move away from it. From the rise of the gun.

He is going to die. And unlike Harold Wren, there will be no afterlife for Harold Finch.

Well. That's not completely true. There will be John.

There will always be John.

**Author's Note:**

> comments and kudos are appreciated!
> 
> i'm planning to add a short coda to this because, as we all know, there's a happy ending to this episode and i refuse to let "is this what you expected?"/"it's what i hoped" go without overanalyzing it to the teeth.


End file.
